Agent-based execution of personalised home care treatments

Abstract

Home Care services are notoriously difficult to deliver efficiently, due to the heterogeneity of the involved actors and the usual co-morbidity of the patients assisted at home. The K4Care platform proposes an agent-based threelayered architecture aimed at addressing these two issues and facilitate the provision of these services. The development of the platform was supported by a methodology to help the automation of the modelling and implementation of the multi-agent system. The intelligent agents of the platform, which personify the Home Care domain actors, have the capability to guide the execution of administrative and medical processes, driving the flux of knowledge and control among all the involved professionals, simplifying their interactions and capturing new medical knowledge emerging from physicians. The platform also provides tools that allow medical practitioners to develop personalised treatments, adapted to the clinical and social circumstances of each patient and based on the standard international recommendations for the most frequent Home Care pathologies. The paper describes the architecture of the system, how personalised treatments are created, and how they are executed through the co-ordinated work of agents. A comparison with other relevant guideline execution systems and an evaluation of the actual state of the work are also provided.

A Multi Agent System for Hospital Organization

“… Knowledge-Based Home Care e-Services for an Ageing Europe (K4Care) is a Home Care multi agent system model that provides e-services to caregivers. K4Care uses MAS technology to perform management of data [14].  Geriatric Ambient Intelligence (GerAmI) is an intelligent supervision system delivering physical and cognitive support [15].The major goal is to maintain elderly and Alzheimer patients in all aspects of daily life.…”

A Multi-Agent System in Ambient Intelligence for the Physical Rehabilitation of Older People

“…For example, K4Care platform [22] provides an environment for all actors involved in the provision of home care services so they can remotely access all the knowledge they require, keep track of their current and pending activities, or request the necessary services for their patients.…”

Modeling the user state for context-aware spoken interaction in ambient assisted living

“…These new technologies create a network of communication channels and heterogeneous systems that help individuals in a variety of situations, such as detecting the needs of health professionals and patients [115,141], healthcare interdisciplinary design [12,93], gamificatio and virtual environments [13,17,99], physical activity and behavior evaluation [107,126,149], therapy and rehabilitation [143,166], supporting the elderly [82,91], monitoring sleep and affect [38,147], gait and exercise evaluation [39,126], in-home monitoring and mobile healthcare [12,71,76,146,162], supporting medical decision [101], or psych-physiological sensing [4,92].…”